Ephesus Selçuk: Eight Thousand Years of Harvests Beneath Ephesus

Why the plain of Ephesus Selçuk, below one of the ancient world’s greatest cities, is still one of the Aegean’s most productive farming landscapes

Most visitors come to Selçuk for Ephesus: the Library of Celsus, the Great Theatre, the marble street that once ran down to the harbour. Far fewer notice what lies between and around the ruins: olive groves on the hillsides, peach and mandarin orchards across the plain, fig and pomegranate trees along the field edges. Yet the ruins and the orchards tell the same story. Ephesus grew into one of the great cities of the Mediterranean because the land around it could feed it and supply its trade, and that land has never stopped being farmed. This is Ephesus Selçuk, and it is also where OLEA’s olives are grown, picked and pressed.

Before Ephesus, there were farmers

About one kilometre south-east of the ancient city stands a low mound called Çukuriçi Höyük. Excavations led by the Austrian Archaeological Institute since 2006 have shown that people settled here in the 7th millennium BC, more than 8,000 years ago, thousands of years before any Greek colonist reached this coast. At that time the mound sat on a small ridge close to the shore of a deep sea inlet, flanked by river plains suited to cultivation, and palaeogeographic studies have found evidence of agriculture there already in the Neolithic period.

The village did not stay isolated. Çukuriçi developed into a trading point between the Aegean and Central Anatolia, and its inhabitants worked obsidian and, later, metal. A second prehistoric mound in the neighbouring valley, Arvalya (Gül Hanım) Höyük, shows that early communities chose this landscape more than once. When UNESCO inscribed Ephesus on the World Heritage List in 2015, the Çukuriçi mound was included as one of the site’s components: official recognition that the history of this place begins with farming villages, long before marble temples.

The river that turned a sea into farmland

The key to the whole region is a river: the Küçük Menderes, known in antiquity as the Kaystros or Cayster. Homer used the meadows along its waters in the Iliad as an image of abundance, comparing the Greek army to the countless geese, cranes and swans that settled noisily on the Cayster’s banks. Later writers kept praising the river for its swans, and the Greek travel writer Pausanias recorded the local legend that Ephesos, the city’s namesake, was a son of the river god.

Over thousands of years the river carried soil down from the mountains and deposited it in the gulf where Ephesus stood. Geoarchaeologists have measured the result: since the mid-Holocene, the delta has advanced more than 18 kilometres into the sea. For the city this was a slow disaster. Each harbour silted up and had to be rebuilt further west; the geographer Strabo noted that one breakwater built to protect the port actually trapped sediment and made matters worse. The silting of the harbour is considered one of the main reasons for the decline of Ephesus, and today the old harbour basin is farmland, several kilometres from the sea.

What ended a port created a breadbasket. The bay that once reached the foot of the surrounding hills became the deep alluvial plain of Ephesus Selçuk, built from millennia of mountain soil. The same geoarchaeologists who mapped the vanished harbours note that the lower floodplain is now an area of abundant farmland, and that a canal cut for the Küçük Menderes in the 20th century served partly to irrigate it. The plain gives depth and water for orchards; the slopes around it, with their thinner, well-drained soils and Aegean sun, are classic olive country.

A city that traded what its land produced

The names layered on this landscape read like a history of Anatolia. In the Bronze Age, Hittite records speak of Apasa, capital of the kingdom of Arzawa, a name scholars link to Ephesus and to the settlement on Ayasuluk Hill. Greek settlers arrived around 1000 BC, and the sanctuary of Artemis, originally an Anatolian mother goddess, grew into one of the largest and most powerful sanctuaries of the ancient world; its temple was counted among the Seven Wonders. Under Rome, Ephesus became the leading city of the province of Asia, with a theatre for some 25,000 spectators.

That wealth rested on two things: the harbour and the hinterland. Austrian researchers have studied amphorae, the clay jars used to store and ship wine and olive oil, to reconstruct Ephesus’ role as a food exporter in the Roman and Late Roman periods. Lake-sediment studies elsewhere in western Anatolia show a sharp rise in olive pollen after the Roman expansion, as olive oil became a cash crop across the region.

Processing the harvest did not end with the Roman Empire. Between 2011 and 2018, the Austrian Archaeological Institute excavated a quarter south of the Church of St Mary that was occupied from the 4th–5th century until the medieval period. Its large installations for processing grapes, grain and olives worked on a scale well beyond household needs, and after the 12th century the area turned fully agrarian, with storage buildings; the last traces of activity date to the 14th century.

From Ayasuluk to Ephesus Selçuk

As the harbour failed, life moved back up to Ayasuluk Hill, where the Basilica of St John was built over the apostle’s tomb. The area came under Turkish rule in 1304, and in the 14th century the İsa Bey Mosque, baths and tombs rose around the hill, which became a capital of the Aydın principality before passing to the Ottomans in 1425. The town that grew around the hill is today’s Ephesus Selçuk. Through every change of ruler and religion, the plain below kept doing what it had done since the Neolithic: producing food.

The Ephesus Selçuk plain today

Today Çukuriçi Höyük, the oldest farming village in the area, sits in a fertile plain surrounded by flourishing fruit plantations. Peaches from the Ephesus Selçuk district are sold across international markets, as part of a Turkish peach and nectarine trade that reached 66 countries in 2024. On the hillsides, olives remain what they have been for millennia. The dominant variety of the southern Aegean is Memecik, which the International Olive Council’s world catalogue credits with roughly 19 percent of all olive trees in Türkiye. It is highly drought-resistant, rich in oil and known for long-lived oils with a balance of fruit, bitterness and pungency. When the European Union registered neighbouring Aydın’s Memecik oil as a Protected Designation of Origin in 2023, the official file described more than 2,000 years of olive growing in the area under Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, the Aydınoğulları and the Ottomans, and credited its wind-swept, hot, dry summers with oils of high phenolic content and naturally low acidity.

Few places in the world can show a continuous agricultural record of 8,000 years with a UNESCO World Heritage Site standing in the middle of the fields.

Where OLEA comes in

OLEA is based in Ephesus Selçuk, and this landscape is our raw material. We do not buy anonymous olives on the open market. Each season we lease olive groves from local owners, and our own team hand-picks the fruit and delivers it to pressing facilities we have inspected in advance, aiming for the first press of the morning so that no olive waits overnight.

Our Wild Olive Oil comes from a different part of the same story: wild olive trees growing on the hills, harvested under an official permit from the İzmir Regional Forestry Directorate. In the 2017 harvest, a team of 12 people worked through roughly 100,000 wild trees in a single week; 750 kg of tiny wild olives gave just 56 kg of oil. Independent laboratory analysis of that oil identified 97 distinct phenolic compounds.

Farmers on this plain were harvesting before Ephesus had a name, and they kept harvesting after its harbour disappeared under the river’s silt. Every tin of OLEA Virgin and Extra Virgin Olive Oil and every bottle of OLEA Wild Olive Oil comes from that same ground.

For wholesale and import enquiries, contact OLEA Olive Oil, Selçuk 35920, İzmir, Türkiye: oleaolive@oleaoliveoil.com, +90 532 242 9735 (GSM/WhatsApp).